Research by the CBI has found that the average employee spends an hour and a half surfing the net at work each week - costing the economy £10.6bn annually.
And while many businesses view personal internet use as 'a modern-day tea break', others have been forced to sack staff for abusing the privilege.
The CBI survey mentions an insurance company which fired a worker for spending entire days playing a 'swords and sorcery' role-playing game.
The study, which covered 502 organisations, employing more than one million workers, also found that nearly two thirds of employers think staff regularly use office time to look at non-work sites. It estimates that around ten days a year are lost this way, at a cost of £939 per employee.
Nevertheless, it would appear that many companies see reasonable use of the web at work as a morale booster. only 14% of firms restricted web access altogether.
According to the CBI's John Cridland, "Many firms feel as long as the job gets done, there is no problem with staff surfing for personal use."
But where should we draw the line - and how? Is it a case of 'allowing' an hour's surfing per week? The difficulties with this are two-fold - policing internet usage could bring up issues of trust, while being seen to condone staff wasting company time might not impress the shareholders ...
Comments (2)
Posted by Simon Norris | June 10, 2008 12:22 PM
Tara,
Our experience is that staff and employers can strike a healthy balance between their mutual interests.
There seems to be a widespread belief that any form of policing by employers is sinister and suspicious, but they have a right to know that staff aren't spending an inappropriate amount of time on personal activities.
Staff, meanwhile, need to accept that there need to be safeguards in place if their employer is going to offer a flexible approach. They are entitled to know exactly what monitoring is being done and to have access to all data collected.
Simon Norris, Temperus Ltd.
Posted on June 10, 2008 12:22
Posted by Steve Miller | July 4, 2008 7:57 AM
Be honest with your people. Let them know the rules when it comes to surfing. I do think reasonable access should be granted in breaks and lunchtime but people are at work to do a job.
In difficult economic times one cannot afford to lose valuable productivity time. Its simple - once the rules are established and employees break them they should be disciplined. Forget airy fairy mitigation tales. With recession times upon us we have to get tougher and that means being straight with our people. Fair but firm comes to mind.
Posted on July 4, 2008 07:57